Toro
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- Mar 19, 2019
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Cardinals wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins has been missing practice with a hamstring injury, but questions have been raised about whether he might actually be sitting out of practice because he’s unhappy with his contract. Hopkins has now answered those questions definitively.
“No Deandre Hopkins is not holding out. From the source,” Hopkins wrote on Twitter.
Players do sometimes report to training camp but decline to participate in practice because they’re unhappy with their contracts. That is reportedly what Chargers defensive end Melvin Ingram is doing right now. Under the league’s new Collective Bargaining Agreement, which increases the fines for training camp holdouts to $50,000 a day and prohibits teams from forgiving those fines, a player like Ingram or Hopkins might think his best method of getting a new contract is to show up but sit out of practice until he gets the contract he wants.
But Hopkins’ tweet indicates that’s not the case. Hopkins has three more years left on his contract at salaries of $12.5 million this year, $13.5 million next year and $13.9 million in 2022, and it wouldn’t be surprising if he feels underpaid and wants more, but he says what’s keeping him off the practice field now is his hamstring, not his contract.